Data Execution Protection (DEP) is a security feature that comes with all versions of Windows starting from Windows 7. DEP is a security feature designed to help protect Windows computers from damage that can be inflicted by viruses and other security threats. While DEP is a pretty handy and useful feature, some Windows users often want to disable it. Well, it is certainly possible for you to enable and disable Data Execution Protection on any version of Windows (including Windows 10) at will. If you want to disable Data Execution Protection in Windows 10, you need to:
Right-click on the Start Menu button to open the WinX Menu. Click on Command Prompt (Admin) in the WinX Menu.
Type the following command into the elevated Command Prompt and then press Enter:
bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx AlwaysOff
Once the Command Prompt says that the operation was completed successfully, DEP will have been disabled on the computer.
On the other hand, if you want to enable Data Execution Protection on a computer running on Windows 10, you need to:
Right-click on the Start Menu button to open the WinX Menu.
Click on Command Prompt (Admin) in the WinX Menu.
Type the following command into the elevated Command Prompt and then press Enter:
bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx AlwaysOn
Once the Command Prompt says that the operation was completed successfully, DEP will have been enabled on the computer.
There is a chance that, if you are trying to turn DEP off on a UEFI-enabled computer (basically any computer that came with Windows 8 or 8.1 out of the box), you will receive an error message that says, “The boot configuration data store could not be opened. Access denied.” whenever you try to execute the commands used to enable and disable DEP in a Command Prompt. If that is the case, make sure that the Command Prompt you use to execute the commands is an elevated Command Prompt that has administrative privileges – titled Command Prompt (Admin) in the WinX Menu.
If making sure that you execute the commands in an elevated Command Prompt doesn’t work, you will have to reboot your computer, open its BIOS settings, disable the Secure Boot feature, save the changes and reboot to get the commands to be executed successfully. Once the command have been executed successfully and you have enabled/disabled Data Execution Protection, simply go into the computer’s BIOS settings again and enable Secure Boot as it actually is a useful feature.
